


The Rain, The Engines

by TheSilentUnderworld



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Character Study, M/M, Rain, Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-15
Updated: 2016-06-15
Packaged: 2018-07-15 04:47:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7208315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSilentUnderworld/pseuds/TheSilentUnderworld
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Between tired eyes and sleep deprived yawns Kylo can hear the humanity that slips out of Hux when he no longer has the strength to pretend he is anything else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Rain, The Engines

Sometimes, when he is too tired to hold it in, Hux's humanity slips out between yawns and eyes closed just slightly too long for an on duty soldier to call a blink.

He'll be sitting there unable to find the quiet little box he stuffs his mind into to sleep and Kylo will hear it. The sounds of rain. Bouncing eerily off of the metal walls, Kylo can never tell if those are literal or figurative, Hux's mind often resembled the Finalizer.

Rain, and damp earth. The type people raised on planets prone to precipitation use to fall asleep, but that is not Hux's intent in listening, not entirely.

The General will listen to this contrast, this visceral, earthy oddity upon a concrete jungle in the form of water on soil, and he is human. He is trying to remember.

He is no longer binary and stainless steel, always aware and sure and precise in his motion. He is imperfect. He has forgotten. He wants to remember.

Kylo gets the gist of it. The soft plopping of rain drops persists always in the background, not now, but then. A woman smiles, there is an inexplicable light that fills the images. Everything is intangible, like a dream, the type one would be sad to awake from.

It smells like something sweet, something cooking, maybe he is in a kitchen. Kylo can almost see the walls of the ship that he and Hux are truly in behind the veil of this memory, it is incomplete, as though the supercomputer Hux would call his mind were missing components, were damaged. Hux would never admit that he was damaged.

The woman touches his cold cheek and makes him warm, he's soaked, his hair is wet because he was playing in the rain. She's very tall- no, Hux is just little. She smiles, and Hux doesn't see a smile of the same blood as he for 10 years.

The memory goes dark. The room is hard lines and cold metal. Hux is terribly human, and his eyes are wide and vulnerable in the dark.

Hux is afraid. The rain pours down hard and the memory is so very vivid. He is barely 16. He shouldn't be graduating at 16, but his father is connected, and Hux was very smart boy, and with that combination there is no stopping him.

And yet he is afraid. For 10 years he has shined his boots and done drills and aced tests. This is his life. Now, more than ever, he sees it all stretched out before him like a river of many branches. The rains feed it, that's what his mother, a native, always said. When he was a child he would play in that rain and see all the little streams of water, he would think that that was his life, a river of many branches being fed by the rain.

Now the rains are quelled. There is but one stream as the badge is pinned to his chest. He is an army cadet. All other possibilities are stemmed and forced into one central, monstrous flow by dams and canals, by the First Order. The soft curves are cut off, the river is diverted by mechanical means. Hux has a destiny now. He never lets his hair get wet in the rain again.

His father smiles. The rain outside pours on.He doesn't remember whether he wanted this.

He knows it doesn't matter. His father smiled, blood of his blood. So he becomes the General of the First Order.

Kylo looks over at his General, who has headphones in and his data pad open to some generic soundbite, an attempt to spare Kylo the patterning of water. His eyes are open, and he looks blankly into the abyss of their sleeping quarters with those wide green’s of his, and he is so eerily human.

They are both born of the same (not exactly the same) earth and blood and pain, and no matter what they say to each other, nor how they try to be other, be different, this is true. Hux is not the logos, Kylo is not the pathos. They are both a thousand things, but before all of them they are human. The way an engine's hum might bring Kylo back to times long dead, the rain takes Hux.

Kylo puts his hand on Hux's and pretends it means nothing. He looks off into the darkness of their sleeping quarters. They become a lopsided dichotomy lost in their own heads.

Kylo heard the engines kick in, and knows a few things.

1.) The Millennium Falcon runs at 1.5 the speed of light (and someday it will be yours, Ben.)

He wishes he could pretend that was rebellion trivia, something he picked up at a glance while searching the archives for more important information, and not what it truly was. (Something so deeply ingrained in his bones that 300 more years under Snokes hand couldn't erase it from his soul.)

2.) He and Hux are dangerously similar.

3.) He is going to break this silence not silence.

Hux isn't looking at him, nor has his hand returned the squeeze of Kylo's, he's somewhere between Academy and being ordained the rank of General when Kylo speaks.

"Hux." He doesn't hear it, headphones. "Hux-" Kylo tries once more, breaking their dichotomy by moving closer.

This time Hux looks to him and blinks, moves the headphones from his ears too slow for his own liking- he is efficient, not tired. "Yes?"

"You were thinking loud."

"Did I wake you?"

"No, but you won't be able to sleep if you keep it up."

"I'll be fine Kylo, my next shift starts in-"

"You say that, but you know that I know you're lying."

Hux sighs. "Don't pity me Ren."

"I'm not." He sighs too. "You just remind me of things when you're tired."

"Oh?" Hux's eyes glance down at Kylo's form, and as though he could see the figure in the reflection of Hux's eyes in the low light Kylo knows Hux sees someone else for a moment. "That's funny, you remind me of things too."

"Either way." Kylo can't help but smile, they're both in their own private traps. "You need to sleep. I'll make you if I must."

Hux rolls his eyes and sits his electronics on the side table. He rubs his eyes, and there is nothing stainless steel, not hard, computer edges about him. "Don't even think about it." He lays down, and closes his tired eyes, and Kylo can hear the humanity slipping back out. "Goodnight."

Kylo smiles once more, and lays himself down too. They find their dichotomy again. "Goodnight."

Kylo hears the rain that plays naturally in Hux's head, when he's tired and let's his humanity slip through the unguarded cracks, and feels the gentle tug in the back of the General's mind to get his hair wet again, to run out into the rain and knock down the dams and canals and sharp edges in favor for thin, long flowing streams that could lead him anywhere.

The engine makes a soft noise again, and Kylo wants to throw away the all black in favor for brown, maybe, a leather jacket, a robe- oil, and grease, and meditation, and Skywalker and Solo and endless possibilities that could have lead him anywhere.

Kylo falls asleep, allowing himself the inherently dangerous indulgence of the 'what if', and Hux does the same.

Kylo falls asleep, allowing himself this indulgence of dreaming, of wondering, if in a different life he might have made another choice.

Could he have ended up the smuggler's son? The prized apprentice of a different master?

Could Hux have ended up a dreamy eyed summer child who had nothing more to worry about than playing in the rain?

Right before Kylo goes under he wonders something more dangerous.

What if they still could.


End file.
